Balloonacy

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Five balloons will lift a dog, twenty a person... and a few thousand a house.

A common occurrence in children's stories and comics is having a character be lifted off his feet and into the air by a bunch of helium balloons. A variation is to have him achieve lift with plain air balloons, even though that's even less plausible.

This is a Trope Examined by the Mythbusters. See under "Real Life examples" below.

See also All Balloons Have Helium when a character simply blows up a balloon with his/her breath and it automatically floats.

Not to be mistaken for Balloon Belly.

Examples of Balloonacy include:


Advertising

  • This Ford Mondeo advert.

Anime and Manga

  • Happens in Kaitou Saint Tail, since the main character simulates magical girl abilities with stage magic, but the stage magic is, well, a bit exaggerated.
  • A variation appeared in Doki Doki School Hours, where an extremely short school teacher was teased by one of her students that this would happen to her. A few of the students proceeded to tie a bunch of balloons to the teacher's obi (they were at a summer festival) and the first student lifted the teacher up so it looked like she was floating away.
  • In the first Lupin III feature-length TV special, Goodbye Lady Liberty, Lupin uses a giant balloon to steal the Statue of Liberty, which he then pilots all the way to the Grand Canyon in order to hide it.
  • In the One Piece cover story featuring Eneru, four Spaceys fly from their island to the MOON using regular balloons.
    • Also one of the dangerous things Luffy's grandfather did to him one of which was tying a bunch of balloons to him and releasing him into the sky.

Comic Books

  • Happened to Bill in Boule et Bill: he bit into a stick that was holding some balloons, and flew off with them.
  • Achille Talon's father once escaped the police by blowing into a breathalyzer balloon until it lifted him into the air.
  • Gaston Lagaffe once left a leaking helium bottle in his car. The gas filled up the car, caused the canvas roof to bulge... and up into the air went the car.
  • The Penguin uses this tactic to steal a payroll while disguised as a balloon vendor in a classic Golden Age Batman story ("Knights of Knavery") in which he teams up with The Joker.
  • A cover to an Archie Comics digest features Jughead as a balloon seller. He begs people passing by to buy a couple, because he's having to hold onto the ground to avoid floating away.
  • The usual gang of idiots at Mad Magazine once (October, 1964) suggested that a large enough balloon filled with helium could lift a big sedan a couple of feet off the ground, enabling the owner to float it into a parking spot.

Film

  • The plot of the Buster Keaton short The Balloonatic is basically "camper stumbles across hot-air balloon; Hilarity Ensues."
  • Gonzo is carried aloft in The Muppet Movie when he buys all the balloons from a fair vendor.
  • In Over the Hedge, Vincent the bear gets tangled up in a massive over-sized clown balloon from a birthday party and is carried aloft. Unfortunately for our heroes, he doesn't go far.
  • In Up, it happens to an entire house. Similar to the Mythbusters example, the animators figured out that in reality it would take somewhere on the order of millions of balloons to lift the house. In the film, they use just about ten or twenty thousand, but the ones they use are twice as big as the main character.
    • It also seems to apply to normal sized ones. In the prologue, we see Carl selling balloons at the zoo. He lets go of his cart for a moment, and needs to grab ahold of it before it floats away.
  • In Police Academy 6 at the very end, there is an award ceremony for stopping the crime wave perpetrated by the mayor to lower real estate price. As part of the decorations for the ceremony, a big bunch of balloons spans from one chair to another. When Cmdt. Lassard sees that Capt. Harris sitting in one of the chairs the balloons are tied to, possibly as revenge for causing a leak in the department for the mastermind, he cuts them free, thus causing the chair Harris is sitting on to float away.
  • Real Genius (or at least the trailer and commercials as it didn't make it into the final cut). Val Kilmer in a balloon-lofted deckchair outside an upper-story classroom: "What are you doing?!" "Floating, sir."
  • The Red Balloon. See here and especially, here.
  • In Disney's Robin Hood, Sir Hiss the snake not only becomes an airborne spy by sticking his head inside an inflated balloon so that his body hangs down as the string (and how does Medieval England have helium-filled rubber balloons to begin with?), but gains altitude by further inflating the balloon, with his breath, while his head is inside it. Balloonacy on so many levels.
  • This was done in The Three Stooges, in an odd variation of this trope, where Moe himself became a balloon. In Dizzy Pilots, Moe falls into a tub of tar, and to get the tar off of him, Larry and Curly cut a hole in his clothes and begin filling it up with gas. Hilarity Ensues as Moe begins to float away when Larry and Curly aren't looking, and they spend the next sizable chunk of the episode trying to get Moe down. He eventually floats through an opening in the ceiling and into the sky. Hearing Moe cry during the ordeal makes this a candidate for Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • At the climax of The Great Mouse Detective, Basil tied the Union Jack flag with balloons underneath to a box of matches in order to chase Ratigan fleeing on his blimp. Helps that they're mice.
  • In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Clouseau is floated out of his apartment window by the inflatable hump in his hunchback costume, thereby causing him to miss the bomb Dreyfus sets off.
  • in The Princess and the Frog, Tiana and Naveen (as frogs) escape from a charging dog by grabbing a bunch of balloons and flying away from him the balloons burst and they fall down and land in the Atchaflaya Basin swamp
  • In The Three Stooges movie, a little girl gets lifted by a bunch of balloons. When a bullet pops them and she falls onto a big cake, she says "That was awesome!".
  • In one scene of One Crazy Summer, Egg Stork hands a large balloon to a young boy. The boy stands up and floats away.

Literature

  • The title character in Curious George is borne aloft by helium balloons. This was repeated in other media adaptations of the stories.
  • Winnie the Pooh uses one of Christopher Robin's balloons to get honey from a beehive high up a tree.
  • Happens to the titular old lady, a balloon seller, in Mrs Cockle's Cat.
  • The Twits by Roald Dahl. Mr. Twit, having already convinced Mrs. Twit that she's shrinking, ties her to a couple hundred balloons, and her feet to a ring in the ground, and leaves her there to 'stretch'. Then Mrs. Twit accidentally gives him the idea to cut her loose...
  • Happened to one of the characters of Caroline visite Paris from the French youth book series Caroline.
  • Some stories use Chinese Sky Lanterns to achieve lift rather than balloons.

Live Action TV

  • The A-Team: Murdock and Hannibal escape a prison by filling plastic bags with helium.

Hannibal: Murdock, how'd I ever let you talk me into this?
Murdock: I don't know: I have intermittent memory loss! *floats away cackling*

  • On Fraggle Rock, Wembly uses a bunch of balloons tied to a basket to return a bird to the Gorgs' Garden in one episoide.
  • Reese pulls this one in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle.
  • In one Monty Python's Flying Circus episode, during one of Terry Gilliam's animations a man grabbed a bunch of balloons and floated away. He was then attacked by a bird with a cannon where its head should be, which was trying to burst the balloons.
    • Don't forget "The Golden Age of Ballooning" episode, riffing on the Montgolfier Bros. and Ferdinand Von Zeppelin. Notably a scene where Zeppelin's brother(Terry Jones) tried to blow up a giant balloon, only to have the air rush back into his lungs, inflating himself(and tearing off his clothes), turning himself into a giant balloon.
  • Sesame Street:
    • Kermit the Frog is demonstrating a Rube-Goldberg device to turn on a radio: the last step involves using a balloon to turn on the radio. Of course nothing works the way it's supposed to, and at the very end Kermit sees the balloon float away taking the radio with it.
    • Kermit and Grover are demonstrating light and heavy objects; the final light object is a large balloon, and Grover picks it up and promptly floats away.
    • On one of the baker segments, a man is holding four balloons, and this causes him to start floating away.
    • A man is apparently mugging a balloon vendor by stealing his balloons and popping them. He steals the largest balloon, he floats away, and up in the air he meets three blackbirds. The largest one pops his balloon, sending him crashing back to the ground and getting what he deserved.
  • Mr. Bean once put some ballons on a baby's pram, and it flies off and he has to make chase.
  • Pretty sure they did this to Graham Norton during a Comic Relief one year.
  • Happened in one of the earliest episodes of El Chavo del Ocho if I recall correctly.
  • Happened in The Lucy Show episode "Kiddie Parties Inc.": Lucy tries to bring a batch of helium balloons to a party, which leads to her floating away, flying through a flock of geese and crashing into a church steeple.
  • MacGyver used a big bunch of balloons tied to a police radio and a tape player and set them free to jam the police communications and enable a family of Roma to defect to the west from Hungary.
  • The final episode of Green Wing ends with Caroline being carried up into the sky by a mass of helium filled balloons at her wedding reception. The DVD boxset extras shows an alternate ending where Guy and Mac grab onto Caroline's ankles and are taken up with her. It ends with Mac saying, "Caroline, there's something I've been meaning to tell you."
  • The Doctor Who story "Planet of the Daleks" has the Doctor and a group of Thals escape from the lowest level of the Dalek city by making a hot air balloon from plastic sheeting and being carried up an air shaft.
  • If memory serves (and that's a big if, so confirmation is welcome), there was an episode of the little-remembered New Leave It to Beaver show featuring this gag.
  • The opening credits to Webster had a sequence of still photos showing the title character being lofted by a bunch of balloons before being caught by his adoptive parents.
  • In the third season of Arrested Development, George tries to escape from house arrest by attaching weather balloons to a deck chair (apparently inspired by the "Larry Lawnchair" example below). Given that he's a Bluth, it ends about as well as you'd expect.

Newspaper Comics

  • Calvin and Hobbes had a storyline where Calvin was lifted off the ground by his balloon.
    • This may have been a fantasy, however. When Calvin tries it for real in a much earlier strip by using a stepladder to jump off, he promptly falls splat on his face, losing the balloon in the process.
  • Dick Cavalli's Winthrop frequently had its title character musing about life while hanging in midair from a single balloon.
  • An old New Yorker magazine cartoon by George Price depicts a policeman talking on a street-corner call box while handcuffed to a man who's held aloft by a handful of balloons: "Vending without a license...and get over here quick!"
  • Deconstructed in Baldo. Hundreds of balloons raise a boy and a chair off the ground just as high as the first-story window of his house, which the wind immediately smacks him into, breaking it and knocking him off the chair and into a thorny rosebush.
  • In Bloom County, one of Oliver Wendell Jones' schemes involves tying a good many helium balloons to Cutter John's wheelchair and floating him to Africa to turn the American ambassador black with one of Oliver's inventions (it was a plan to battle apartheid). The entire thing was treated as a parody of a space program, and ended with Cutter and Opus getting stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Theater

  • There's a play called Up! (no relation to the film) about a Larry Lawnchair-type.
  • Cirque Du Soleil has used this trope twice.
    • In Mystere, while the High Bar act is being set up, the female baby (played by an adult actress) is lifted skyward by a clutch of red balloons. She descends back to Earth during the finale. This is actually accomplished with wires.
    • Corteo has a whole act that serves as a Real Life version of this trope, the "helium dance". The Clowness, played by a little person, is fitted into a harness that dangles from several giant balloons and proceeds to float over the stage and audience.

Video Games

  • Two of the endings of Chrono Trigger have this happen.
  • In World of Goo, one type of goo-ball turns into balloons, which have to be used to lift up other parts of the structures you build.
  • The entire conceit of Balloon Fight, which is essentially Joust, except with kids and... bird thingies flying using a pair of balloons.
  • The Balloon weapon in Makai Kingdom - single use, lifts the user out of the stage for the rest of the level. This makes it nearly useless for your own characters, but deadly in the hands of an enemy, as any enemy removed from the stage adds their levels to every other enemy left on the battlefield.
  • Pitfall Harry uses a balloon to traverse a large open area in Pitfall II: The lost Caverns
  • Drifloon, a Pokémon that looks like a balloon, is said to carry off children who mistake it for a normal balloon and grab its stringlike tails. However, since they're only 16 inches (40 cm) tall and weigh 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg), they wind up getting carried away by said child or blown around by any breeze. Its evolution Drifblim, however, can learn Fly.
    • There's also the Air Balloon, an item that allows Pokemon to float and avoid Ground-type attacks. A single red balloon is enough to lift even the monstrous, half-ton Snorlax into the air!
    • That's also how promotional Pikachus are able to use the move Fly, according to the card game.
  • Yoshi's Island featured Shyguys dangling from balloons.

Web Original

  • One Strong Bad E-Mail shows Strong Bad, Strong Mad, and The Cheat inhaling helium from leftover party balloons to make their voices high. The Cheat accidentally inhales his entire balloon, blowing himself up and causing him to fly away.

Western Animation

  • Happens once in Beethoven the Animated Series: Mr.Huggs floats off when a bully ties balloons to him.
  • Subverted in The Simpsons episode "Lost Our Lisa". Homer buys a bunch of balloons, says "I hope this works"...and then trades them to a cherry pick operator.

"Well, I've already got some balloons, but...they're not this nice. Deal!"

    • In another The Simpsons episode, Homer tries to patrol the Springfield border from a lawnchair on balloons, but as soon as he sits down the chair collapses. Lenny and Carl get on instead, and are instantly propelled into the stratosphere (where the Up house is seen in the distance).
    • In a first-season episode, a single balloon is enough to lift Maggie about six inches off the floor.
  • Happens at least a couple times in SpongeBob SquarePants. One where he had to get home and the other when he wanted to fly.
    • Also when he and Bubble Buddy are trying to escape his friends; they don't get far.
  • The Dreamworks Animation logo, anyone?
  • This is part of the premise of the Don Hertzfeldt cartoon Billy's Balloon. (The other part is that balloons are sadists.)
  • Used often enough as part of a gag involving a Rube Goldberg Device in old Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons.
    • Happens to Claude Cat as part of Hubie and Bertie pretending that he's dead and heading for Cat Heaven in the short Hypo-Chondri Cat
    • Happens to Bugs Bunny in Bushy Hare
    • Happens to Sylvester in Pizza Tweety Pie
  • Happened at least a few times in various Winnie the Pooh episodes, such as "Balloonatics" (season 1 episode 5).
  • In The Perils of Penelope Pitstop episode "The Boardwalk Booby Trap", the Hooded Claw gets rid of the Ant Hill Mob by giving them helium balloons that cause them to float away.
  • In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode, "Griffon the Brush-Off", Pinkie Pie strapped herself with several balloons to float up to the cloud that Rainbow Dash and her old friend, Gilda, were on. Gilda then proceeded to pop Pinkie's balloons when Rainbow Dash wasn't around.
  • Happens to George in Curious George when a group of children each gives him their balloon. Ted aka "the Man in the Yellow Hat" then grabs the rest of the balloons from the vendor and flies off in pursuit.
  • In the Regular Show episode "Just Set Up The Chairs", a depressed Pops floats off on a bunch of balloons when Benson reminds him the birthday party they're holding isn't for him.
  • In Birdz, Tommy the turkey is held aloft by a single balloon concealed in a backpack. This becomes a plot point in one episode, where his friends try to convince him to ditch the balloon, only to realize that turkeys can't fly.
  • In a variant of this trope, Get Muggsy has Carl and Tred inhale helium and tie strings to themselves to sneak into a park, with obvious results.
  • In one episode of the U.S. Acres segment of Garfield and Friends, Wade Duck spent the whole winter trying (and failing) to fly. Later, when several characters tried to stop an out of control tractor, they gave Wade their baloons and they made him float.

Real Life

  • Done successfully by Jon Tickle on Brainiac: Science Abuse.
  • MythBusters researched how many you'd need. It takes a lot of balloons to lift a person—even if it's just a five-year-old!
    • Specifically, it takes 3,500 party-size balloons to lift a 40 pound child.
  • A guy named Larry Walters did it, and there's a movie based on his story, called Danny Deckchair (the real dude was nicknamed Larry Lawnchair) Friends of mine also made a couple gigantic balloons in the backyard of their cafe, and launched customers a few feet up (safely secured by a rope).
  • A Brazilian priest did this for fund-raising reasons. However, he lost control and was found dead weeks later.
  • A Brazilian couple claimed their kid was inside a baloon that was floating around. However, once it landed, it was revealed the boy wasn't there and his parents were just pulling a scam.
  • A dirigible is basically a giant helium balloon (or hydrogen, which is even lighter, if you don't mind the slight explosion problem.)
  • On October 15, 2009, in Fort Collins, Colorado, it seemed that a child climbed into an experimental helium filled weather balloon, which slipped its mooring and floated away, thus causing a huge media sensation. When the balloon landed near Denver International Airport, rescuers discovered that the kid was not inside, and soon after, an ominous photograph surfaced showing the payload basket apparently falling off the balloon. What really happened is that it was a hoax planned by the kid's father to publicize a Reality Show.
    • Even before the hoax was revealed, there were a number of knowledgable people pointing out that the craft in question wasn't large enough to carry the child.
  • In May 2010 a man named Jonathan Trappe crossed the English Channel [dead link] in this manner.
  • National Geographic Channel's How Hard Can It Be has made and floated a house inspired by Up.
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